Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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opium to lure white women. Representations of white women’s victimization by Chinese men not only perpetuate the “yellow peril” myth, but they also reinforce raced and gendered hierarchy. Sui Sin Far’s re-representation of white women in her stories, then, undermines both racism against Chinese men and sexism against white women. However, while undermining the stereotypes of white women as the weaker vessel of morality and in critiquing Chinese patriarchy, Sui Sin Far contrasts progressive American women with conventional backward Chinese women, thus reinforcing another gendered and raced stereotype.
Moreover, Sui Sin Far highlights the privileged social position of white women and its impact on Chinese immigrants, suggesting that acculturation entails subject formation shaped by competing ideologies inscribed on raced, gendered bodies and spaces. I would argue that the gendered interracial relationship and the implications of white women’s mobility in Chinatown and their intimate interactions with Chinese immigrants render Sui Sin Far’s stories such as “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” and “The Wisdom of the New” much more complex and subversive than mere descriptions of Chinatown life. The white “woman about town” plays a central role in the politics of gendered interracial relationships, facilitating or impeding Chinese immigrants’ process of acculturation, as shown in both stories. But in “The Wisdom of the New” a counter-narrative emerges as an undercurrent below the main narrative. To explore this undercurrent demands an interpretation that resists conformity with the gaze that inscribes dominant ideologies of race, gender, and culture on the raced, gendered body and space. It is from an apparently passive background that this counter-narrative emerges to render Sui Sin Far’s stories more complex, ambivalent, and subversive than their central narratives would suggest. Read as a subversive, interventional narrative against racism and sexism, “The Wisdom of the New” is a path breaker in exploring the intersections of gender and race. It deals with the impact of gendered interracial relationships on Chinese immigrants’ acculturation as depicted in “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” but with a more complex portrayal of the gendered and raced subjectivity of its major characters, particularly Pau Lin. Confined to a life of subordination to her husband, Pau Lin is jealous of her husband’s white American friend, Adah Charlton, the niece of Mrs. Dean, a Sunday school teacher in Chinatown, who takes Wou Sankwei under her wing shortly after his arrival in San Francisco at age nineteen and remains a motherly figure and close friend to him. White women in this story, as in “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” help facilitate the assimilation of immigrant Chinese young men like Sankwei but, in doing so, contribute to the alienation of the young men’s wives. Hence Americanization, or rather assimilation, is a privilege for Chinese men, particularly those of the merchant class, whose spatial and social mobility is gendered and classed. While Sankwei sees no need for his wife to learn English or American culture, he is determined to send their son, Yen, to an American school against the strong disapproval of his wife. Jealous of her husband’s affection for Adah and unable to adapt to American culture because of the inequality of race and gender, which has shaped her thinking and feeling to an extreme, Pau Lin kills her son to prevent him from becoming “American.” The narrator comments on Adah’s initial ignorance of Pau Lin’s feelings about her, revealing white women’s privilege while also highlighting the intersections of gender and race underlying Pau Lin’s jealousy: “Secure in the difference of race, in the love of many friends, and in the happiness of her chosen work, no suspicion whatever crossed her mind that the woman [Pau Lin] whose husband was her aunt’s protégé tasted everything bitter because of her” (“The Wisdom of the New” 51). But other narrative details suggest that jealousy is not the only reason Pau Lin’s resists her son’s Western education. In fact, Pau Lin finds support for her resistance among her Chinese female neighbors, who help confirm her fear of losing her son to white America.
Sui Sin Far employs the architectural characteristics of Chinatown apartment buildings for multiple purposes, including establishing a network of communication for Pau Lin. The balconies of the surrounding apartments become a social space for exchanging information among Chinese women, whose opinions of white America reinforce Pau Lin’s fear for her son. Sien Tau, leaning over her balcony, says to Pau Lin: “You did perfectly right. . . . Had I again a son to rear, I should see to it that he followed not after the white people” (48). The narrator reveals that Sien Tau’s son has married a white woman, and their children behave like strangers to their grandmother. Another Chinese woman, Lae Choo, echoes Sien Tau’s words: “In this country, she is most happy who has no child.” Then she goes on to deplore Lew Wing’s young daughter’s “bold and free” ways with white men. Pau Lin joins in “at another balcony door,” saying, “One needs not to be born here to be made a fool of ” (48). Their conversation moves from the harms white Americans have brought to Chinese families to the violence resulting from missionary practice in China. Their complaints reveal their resentment about the loss of respect for the Chinese and their culture and suggest a connection between the degradation of the Chinese and the colonialist Christian missions in both China and Chinatown. The exchanges among immigrant Chinese women on the balconies help validate Pau Lin’s view of the deplorable “wisdom of the new” that may “contaminate” her son (52).
Below the balconies, the Chinatown street scenes seem to mock the Chinese women’s parochialism. In fact, the balcony provides Pau Lin with a bird’s-eye view of Chinatown’s streets, whose scenes simultaneously serve as evidence of what she deplores about things American and offer a point of view that challenges the Chinese women’s bemoaning of the “contamination” of Chinese values by American culture. As she gazes “below her curiously,” Pau Lin is fascinated by what she sees:
The American Chinatown held a strange fascination for the girl from the seacoast village. Streaming along the street was a motley throng made up of all nationalities. . . . There went by a stalwart Chief of the Six Companies engaged in earnest confab with a yellow-robed priest from the joss house. A Chinese dressed in the latest American style and a very blonde woman, laughing immoderately, were entering a Chinese restaurant together. Above all the hubbub of voices was heard the clang of electric cars and the jarring of heavy wheels over cobblestones. (49)
The visual details and their implications of this motley “American Chinatown” made up of diverse racially and ethnically marked bodies, however, suggest an inevitable, irresistible cultural hybridization in process that counters the reification of either Chinese or Western culture. The presence of electric cars running through Chinatown renders it resolutely part of the American city.
Critics, however, tend to overlook this undercurrent of counter-narrative embedded in the spatial and bodily images of Chinatown in “The Wisdom of the New.” Xiao-huang Yin, in discussing “the subtlety of Sui’s writing,” refers to the passage quoted above as an example of how Sui Sin Far uses “background” to indicate “the cultural shock a newly arrived Chinese woman is experiencing” (92, 91, 92). Yin further observes that the “minute description provides details that existed nowhere else in popular American fiction, and the detailed web of facts about daily life that she provided created a realistic environment in which her characters could interact” (92). But rather than a passive background or environment, the Chinatown neighborhood and its everyday activities constitute a counter-discourse, one that engages with the story’s central conflict and ambivalence as noted by Ferens in her discussion of the story. Ferens states that “the story deplores the parochialism that hampers cross-cultural contacts.” Yet it is “a deeply ambivalent story that cannot be reduced to one reading.” According to Ferens: “The fundamental problem it raises is that the two cultural groups are limited or limit themselves to just looking at each other. This leads to the reification of cultural difference and, subsequently, to a struggle for dominance fought over the body of a child” (107). Given the sociohistorical context of this story, the struggle of immigrant Chinese women to keep their children from Americanization seems to be more a matter of resistance to assimilation and to losing their children to the dominant culture than “a struggle for dominance.” Underlying their fear and resistance, as well as the hegemony of white America, is the denial of racial and cultural hybridity, which is already taking place in Chinatown. Pau Lin’s observation of the “American Chinatown” as “a motley throng made up of all nationalities” (49) subverts precisely the reification of cultural difference and resists the dominance of any supposedly discrete ethnic